RioMar, the Spanish-Latin seafood restaurant, will serve its last ceviche platter this Saturday (Aug. 2). That happens to be White Linen Night, a traditionally busy evening at the trailblazing Warehouse District restaurant.

Mile Prescott, RioMar's chef and co-owner, said the restaurant's downtown neighborhood has changed so dramatically in recent years that the concept no longer fits the audience. He and partner Nick Bazan plan to open a taqueria in the same space.

"It's a lot more crowded down here than it was 14 years ago (when RioMar first opened), but we're not getting as much local business," Prescott said. "We're not, like, losing money, but we're certainly not doing much beyond subsisting."

Chef Adolfo Garcia opened RioMar with partner Bazan in 2000. Its food was an expression of Garcia's personal history. Garcia is a Panamanian-American, born and raised in New Orleans, who trained as a young chef in Spain.

That combination of influences was unique to find in the restaurant of an ambitious chef in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. RioMar became, for a time, one of the most exciting seafood restaurants in town. It made my list of the Top Ten Restaurant in New Orleans in the 2007 Lagniappe Dining Guide.

Garcia sold his share of RioMar to Bazan in 2012 after opening a series of other local restaurants, including High Hat Café, La Boca and Ancora Pizzeria & Salumeria. Prescott, who'd previously worked under Garcia, became the restaurant's chef and ultimately a partner.

Prescott said that the taqueria under works for the old RioMar space will feature a prominent bar, well-stocked with tequila, mezcal and rum. Of the food, he said, "We have every intention of making everything fresh. We'll do tacos, burritos, chilaquiles — things that people understand."

Prescott insisted that the replacement of RioMar with a taqueria did not signal an abandonment of ambitious Latin cooking. To that end, he and Bazan are preparing to open a Peruvian-and-Japanese influenced seafood restaurant in the Faubourg Marigny called Nuevo Centro.

The restaurant, which Prescott hopes to open in the spring, will center around an open kitchen where chefs prepare ceviches and seafood tartares with Peruvian ingredients and spices, but in the manner of a sushi bar. "I want a lot of interaction between diners and the chefs," Prescott explained. "So I want to focus on the sushi method, but the Peruvian palette is a lot broader than Japanese, and think it will be a nice counterpoint."